


landscape with gun

by zauberer_sirin



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-17 06:56:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8134466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: Five years later Bellamy has to face the threat of violence again.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [semele](https://archiveofourown.org/users/semele/gifts).



> Prompt: "Bellamy Blake + power. It can be his time as a cadet, his grab for power on the ground, or a future situation in which he’s already a mature person when he wields power again."

**i.**

Monty brings in a couple of gallons of water.

“Tomorrow’s storm is going to last a few hours,” he explains. “You’ll be stuck.”

Bellamy smiles. If their little community in the valley had a mayor it would probably be Monty.

“Oh, and another thing,” he says. “Just in case.”

It’s been so many years since Bellamy held a gun that when Monty pushes one into his hand he almost doesn’t recognize the shape.

“I know,” Monty says, avoiding his eyes for the first time in years. “But…”

He leaves without another word.

 

**ii.**

Bellamy understands the logic.

Their community is normally left alone - that was the idea - but they have crops and they have tech, and a storm, with all the fog in this valley, leaves them with zero visibility, very low chance of being able to defend themselves. They had travelled far down south to avoid violence, found a place to isolate themselves, but their set-up seems too tempting sometimes, and Bellamy wonders why they haven’t been attacked before (not seriously, they have had to frighten away the odd thief).

Whether Monty has heard something specific from other villages and he’s not telling Bellamy, or he’s just being extra cautious and this threat it unnamed and ambiguous, it just makes sense to arm themselves until the storm passes.

It makes sense, he tells himself.

Raven comes into the house (they’ve gotten used to calling it that, even though it has one room and the walls are made of both wood and debris, but it’s better than the tents they had when they arrived here) after her work.

She looks at the gun for a moment, set on the table by the window, Bellamy at the other corner of the room.

“I see Monty has already been here,” she comments, like she already knew, and slips into lighter clothes to go out and help reinforce everybody’s windows before the storm tomorrow night.

The valley had been given up on, a lost cause, by the time some of the people from the Ark, some of the Grounders, moved in - away from alliances and war and away from the memory of past confrontations. The Grounders could turn the toxic dirt of the valley into fertile earth in five years, and the technology brought from the Ark could keep them alive through the winters. The thing was not to starve until then. And they almost did starve - Bellamy cringes remembering the feeling of Raven’s ribs under his fingers on the fourth winter and swears he will never let things get so bad again.

There are things he still has to protect, he just didn’t think it would be -

He remembers the first time he held a gun, can still taste the pride in his mouth like something warm and salty, and the sense of safety. If he was trusted with such a responsibility, that meant it was less likely they’d suspect of his family. It’d be years until the weight of a gun in his hand turned from pride to shame, then repulsion.

He associates guns, a particular kind of violence, with Octavia, _always_. And he’d forgotten all about it, because he hasn’t seen his sister in three years. He misses her, but he admits a certain relief at the fact that they are no longer in each other’s lives. He can only imagine Octavia feels a similar apprehension about meeting anyone from the Ark at this point. At least that’s what he tells himself.

 

**iii.**

“Why would Monty give it to me?” he asks out loud, neurotic, pacing around their room while Raven tries to change into more comfortable clothes, clothes which are not smeared with mud. “There are other options.”

On their second year the threat of invasion seemed asphyxiating and they decided to help the Grounders learn some rudiments of shooting. They couldn’t teach them much, because they didn’t have ammunition to spare - going back to Polis to ask their old friends for more seemed impossible, and like an admission of defeat. In the end they didn’t need any at all, so they got to keep their pride.

He trembles thinking not about having to use the gun but about failing to do it correctly after so long. His aim is gone. He is a fucking farmer now. He grows things, he scribbles in a little notebook, walking up the mountains and drawing little maps of the place, noting down harvest data year after year. He used to revel in being called a soldier. Now the word makes his stomach twist.

Raven yawns, exhausted. 

“He gave it to you because he knows you’ll protect us,” she tells Bellamy, casually. “You’re a leader.”

He stops her, fingers wrapped around her wrist.

“No, you’re a leader. Monty is a leader. I’m just…”

He lets her go, gesturing at the empty air between them, the difference so obvious he is stunned Raven can’t see it (one day, though, one day, he fears, she’ll figure out, figure him out, and leave, he’s just waiting, he keeps thinking there has been some kind of mistake, misunderstanding).

“Idiota,” Raven mutters as she kisses the curls at the top of his head and goes to blow out the light.

 

**iv.**

The next day the air smells of electricity and mud, and he guesses Monty’s predictions, Raven’s equipment, they were right.

He tells people to share their houses for the night, safety in numbers, and with a couple of neighbors he moves the few animals they keep to the empty stables near the back of the village, so if attacked they’ll have more chances of guarding them.

The older Grounder women (the ones from further down south, the ones who adore Raven because they can speak Spanish with her) laugh at Bellamy as he tries to scoop an unruly pig in his arms. It takes him three attempts.

During their first year here he wouldn’t go anywhere without a gun, still thinking this fragile new world they have chose together was going to be taken away from him sooner rather than later. He knew, in his heart, the things he would do to stop others from hurting what was his - his people, his land. Until the joints of his fingers hurt from holding the pistol so tight. The grip was loosened when he began knowing the Grounders in the area better. People who, like him and the others from the Ark, didn’t belong in the new world of power grabs and treatises of the new alliance, the new Wanheda.

When he goes to the hothouse to grab the most delicate plants he can feel the gun pressing against the small of his back, an alien touch where it used to be so familiar.

He puts the plants under the table, just in case, the little tomato vine, the mint leaves, he tucks them in like he would to a child. He remembers Raven saying he was given a gun because he would protect them. Meaning all of them - the village, a hard admission for Raven, even after all these years, a hard admission that the Grounders are now her people, after the Grounders took her only family away from her.

“You think the radio tower will hold?” he asks when Raven comes back from locking up and reinforcing her multiple work stations..

“Of course it will hold,” she replies with a cocky smirk. “It will take more than a puny storm. _I_ built it.”

The night passes like a storm itself.

The fog descents, and then the hailing starts, a maddening noise surrounding them for three hours, while Bellamy sits at their table, finger caressing the barrel while he stares at the door. The door rattles but he can tell it’s the storm - he knows the noises of assault intimately, he constructed a whole identity on being able to identify them from afar.

“Come to bed,” Raven calls in the darkness.

Even in bed he keeps the pistol in his hand under the covers, falling asleep with its still-comforting weight against his hip.

 

**v.**

In the morning everything smells of mud, but no longer metallic.

Most of the shutters are busted, but they held on long enough. Bellamy can hear the village beginning to stir awake, earlier than usual, like they are anxious to see with their own eyes, check that the world is indeed still there, mostly intact.

In the morning Monty comes by to give them - well, Raven, more than him - the rundown.

“Mostly trees,” he says, hunched over a map with Raven. The radio tower is fine and she shoots Bellamy a dirty look when Monty mentions that.

Bellamy makes them coffee. It’s not an unusual picture. Even after five years the only three Arkers in the village find comfort in each other’s presence sometimes. Maybe it comes from the many times they have saved each other’s lives. Three orphans in the storm. Bellamy knows they are the only true family he’s ever had.

When Monty is done getting them up to speed and shamelessly gorging on their coffee and bread he approaches Bellamy, asks for the little handgun back.

“You know what? I think I’m keeping it,” he says.

Monty fixes him a serious look, studying Bellamy, and there’s something familiar in the look, it reminds him of how they used to look at each other after Mount Weather, how often they would seek each other in those first days, because they understood each other in a way no one else on the planet could. We all contain killers, Bellamy thinks, _but we are not killers_.

Monty nods and claps his hand on Bellamy’s shoulder. “Okay.”

After he leaves Bellamy puts the gun away in a drawer, knowing it’s unlikely he’ll need it any time soon, knowing it’s not a sin to be ready to use it.

“You smell like a pig,” Raven points out when they are alone again.

“No, I don’t,” Bellamy says. “I smell _of_ pig. There’s a difference.”

“Sure there is.”

As a concession he opens the windows to let the fresh air in, smelling slightly fresher than usual.


End file.
